FDR - Jean Edward Smith [278]
Meanwhile, anxious contenders edged toward the starting gate. On December 18, 1939, Vice President Garner announced his candidacy. “I see that the vice president has thrown his bottle—I mean his hat—into the ring,” Roosevelt quipped at cabinet.32 Garner’s candidacy was a protest against the New Deal, FDR, and a third term rolled into one. He had little chance. John L. Lewis’s classic put-down of the vice president as a “labor-baiting, poker-playing, whiskey-drinking, evil old man” rang true among too many of the party’s rank and file.*
James Farley also eyed the office. An energetic fifty-one, Farley was immensely popular with the party’s professional politicians. But his Catholicism was a handicap, and his lack of familiarity with policy issues was dumbfounding. Ignorance of economics and foreign affairs has never been a bar to high office, but in 1940 the nation required more than Farley could offer. Chicago’s Cardinal Mundelein, the Democratic party’s unofficial prelate, attempted to talk Farley out of running, but to no avail. “I will not let myself be kicked around by Roosevelt or anyone else,” said Farley.33
Cordell Hull played his cards closer to his chest. He was betting that Roosevelt would not run and that he would be the natural fallback. FDR encouraged Hull to believe as much. At a cabinet dinner in early 1940, Mrs. Hull sat next to the president and told him her husband did not like to make speeches. “Well, tell him he had better get used to it,” Roosevelt replied. “He’ll have a lot of it to do soon.”34 Hull considered it incompatible with his position as secretary of state to campaign for the nomination. Knowing that Roosevelt’s support was all he needed, he chose to wait.35 “I believe the world is going straight to hell,” he told FDR, “and I think I can be of greater service in the State Department.”36
Other potentials faded early. Harry Hopkins, with whom the president felt most comfortable, was literally at death’s door, hospitalized first at the Mayo Clinic, then at the Naval Hospital in Washington, with an as-yet-undiagnosed digestive ailment. Paul V. McNutt, the former governor of Indiana, whom Roosevelt appointed to head the newly established Federal Security Agency, was new to the ways of Washington and mistook the president’s hearty welcome for political support. Henry Wallace, Securities and Exchange Commission head William O. Douglas, and Attorney General Robert H. Jackson all had the presidential urge, but with little professional support their candidacies failed to materialize.
In Europe, meanwhile, the military situation was shrouded in fog. After Poland’s defeat, both sides settled into a period of watchful waiting. Troops deployed with theatrical precision, but no shots were fired. The Germans, taking advantage of their recent battlefield experience, honed their maneuver tactics and air-to-ground coordination. The French, whose tactical doctrine traced to World War I, assiduously dug fortifications. The British, equally confident that the home-front hardships induced by the Allied economic blockade would bring Germany to its senses, dithered and did little. “The accumulation of evidence that an attack is imminent is formidable,” Chamberlain wrote his sister, “and yet I cannot conceive myself that it is coming.” On April 5, 1940, the prime minister gloated to the National Conservative Union meeting in London, “Hitler has missed the bus”—a gaffe second only to his “Peace in our time” proclamation after Munich.37
In Berlin, witty Germans who looked west spoke of Sitzkrieg. The French called it le drôle de guerre. Ironically, it was Senator Borah who baptized the situation with a name when in December 1939 he spoke of the “phony war” on the western front. If the stalemate in Europe had continued, FDR would likely have retired. “I think my